Pacific Spirit Marine Institute

The loss of biodiversity and Donald Rumsfeld; the connection is creepy!

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Rainforests cover only 2% of the Earth’s surface, or 6% of its land mass, yet they house over half the plant and animal species on earth. They originally covered at least twice that area.

By some estimates 137 plant, animal and insect species vanish everyday from the earth. 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients. Less than 1% of the treasure trove of what is available has been tested by scientists. Think of all the possible cures for disease and possible future antibiotics that are being lost daily.

Achim Steiner, executive direct of of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) says,”the world is losing the intellectual patents of nature before we even have the chance to understand or unravel them.” Stiener also believes biodiversity is linked to the phenomenon of climate change.

The loss of biodiversity in our oceans is impairing the ocean’s capacity to provide food, maintain water quality and recover from stresses.

The depths of the oceans also hold untold treasures that are unexamined, making the loss of biodiversity in the seas even more heart wrenching. What has been lost with the extinction of species such as the southern gastric brooding frog, science is able to imagine. Having only been discovered in the 1980’s it has already gone extinct and with it a possible cure for peptic ulcers from which 10’s of thousands of people suffer. We are losing species everyday in our oceans we don’t even know about.

The problem with losing species we don’t even know existed isn’t just the loss of their existence and potential benefits to the environment and mankind, but not knowing what we have lost gives some sort of creepy credence to Donald Rumsfeld’s statement:

“…there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”